• IVDR-certified molecular platform identifies bacteria in hours, enabling faster treatment decisions, shorter hospital stays, and reduced healthcare costs
• NATO Innovation Fund and a consortium led by Slingshot Ventures Co-Lead Investment to scale Inbiome’s IVDR-certified molecular platform across Europe and accelerate U.S. market entry

The NATO Innovation Fund announced today its investment in Inbiome, a Dutch molecular diagnostics company redefining microbiology testing. The USD 16 million Series A was co-led by the NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) and a consortium of investors led by Michiel Boehmer and Slingshot Ventures. Michiel Boehmer, former CEO of Unilabs, one of the world’s largest diagnostic services providers, will also serve as an advisor to Inbiome.

The investment will support the expansion of Inbiome’s IVDR-certified Molecular Culture ID platform across Europe and accelerate the extension of the platform into additional indications, including bloodstream infections.

Delivering Faster, Better Infection Diagnostics to improve hospital services and strengthen resilience

Bacterial infections are among the most significant global health threats, contributing to approximately one in five deaths worldwide.  Clinical microbiology still relies heavily on culture-based methods developed over a century ago. These methods require three to four days for pathogen identification and frequently fail once antibiotics have been initiated, leading to antibiotic misuse, delayed surgeries, prolonged hospital stays, and the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

This creates significant challenges and costs in everyday hospital practice, and has serious implications in conflict zones, where drug-resistant infections are rising due to damaged healthcare systems, overuse of antibiotics, war-related injuries, and population displacement, driving the spread of resistant bacteria across regional borders.

Civilian hospitals, military medical units, and specialized biosecurity and emergency response laboratories are increasingly seeking faster, culture-independent methods to guide treatment decisions and improve patient outcomes.

Inbiome’s molecular culture ID platform breaks through this bottleneck with clear, measurable advantages:

• Speed: Bacterial identification within 5 hours, compared to 3 to 4 days for a standard culture.
• Accuracy: Detection of 50% more bacterial pathogens directly from clinical samples, without relying on pathogen growth.
• Clinical impact: Faster, more targeted treatment, helping to reduce complications, shorten hospital stays and reduce the need for medical evacuations on the battlefield.
• Cost reduction: Lower healthcare costs through reduced length of stay and decreased use of inappropriate broad-spectrum antibiotics.

By enabling clinicians to prescribe the right antibiotic from the start, the platform also provides a critical tool in the fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

IVDR-Certified and Ready for Deployment

Inbiome is not a development-stage company – the platform is certified and already being deployed.

In April 2025, Inbiome received IVDR certification for its Molecular Culture ID platform for samples obtained from normally sterile sites, including synovial fluid, cerebrospinal fluid, tissue biopsies, and other critical specimens. Certification for blood is expected soon, with urine to follow later this year, extending the same IVDR-certified molecular approach into some of the most time-sensitive clinical pathways.

The system is now being implemented in European hospital laboratories, with ongoing collaborations across more than 20 leading hospitals in Europe and the United States to support clinical validation and adoption.

Use of Proceeds

The Series A financing will be deployed to support the expansion of Inbiome to Europe and into the U.S.  With IVDR certification secured, the investment will fund the commercial rollout of the platform across Europe, including hospital laboratory implementation, scaling production, and customer support.

In addition, the funding will enable further platform development – including the addition of fungal diagnostics, and accelerate the FDA clearance process.

Inbiome also plans to extend its offering to conflict zones, by delivering species-level pathogen identification on the battlefield in addition to civilian hospitals.